I will not quibble with "brilliant," though it may prove to be an
overstatement. I am, however, surprised that Professor Lifshitz does
not detect what she would consider a sustained, cohesive argument, the
qualifying distinction of a "true monograph."

Her response to the book is apparently based on her belief that it
contains too much previously published material: "three of its four
substantive chapters...either have been or will be published
wholly...or partially." This is misleading. By my reckoning
(counting pages), about 27 percent of the book was previously
published in some form. Professor Lifshitz's notion that the "parts
of the book could...easily be torn asunder" may be justified, but
her assumption that pre-existing publications preclude a unified
argument is flawed.

The reviewer assumes prior publications have been simply pasted into
the book. As she puts it in reference to Chapter 4, "readers who
missed the 2003 article might as well read it here." This is too
cavalier. In fact, readers should consult the book as a superior
piece of scholarship: not only is the argument of the book chapter
significantly revised (the article says nothing about gender), but it
is also a more reliable guide to exegetical sources and editions.
Some 30 percent of the chapter is new material. As for Chapter 2, 6
pages out of the 30 (excluding notes) have been published in a similar
form. In other words, about 80 percent of the chapter is new.
Professor Lifshitz's own comments suggest that this article fits
seamlessly into the chapter, undermining her claim that the previous
publications are "tangential." Finally, a version of Chapter 5, "The
Wife of Bath's Marginal Authority," appeared in Studies in the Age
of Chaucer (2010). Only half of the article appears in the book,
revised to fit its new context. In the process of revising the
article into the book chapter, I cut a number of manuscripts from the
discussion (among them the Ellesmere Canterbury Tales). Chaucer
scholars will certainly not find the article and book interchangeable.

Professor Lifshitz passes hastily over Chapter 1, which in her view
does not "succeed in bringing the chapters together." In fairness to
the book, I would point out that the first chapter outlines a number
of premises central to the argument and structure of the study. For
example, the first chapter proposes that we broaden the canon of
exegesis in order to access the full historical range of exegetical
writings, which I argue should include not only formal academic
commentaries (the present canon) but also drama, letters, sermons,
autobiographies, and vernacular poetry (pp. 7-13). The selection of
texts for the case studies that follow is linked to the argument about
opening the canon. This is meant to be a "discontinuous history" (13),
an attempt to "historicize medieval inventions of religious authority,
including the actual breaks and reversals in the development and
justification of ecclesiastical power" (5). If we open the canon, I
propose, we discover that exegesis is "a broadly dispersed discourse
that is...neither continuous nor unified" (9). Accordingly, I
concentrate on historical points at which exegesis exhibits "breaks
with its own past, shifts of emphasis, and reinventions of form as
well as method," for "it is precisely at such moments of change that
we can best perceive what is at stake in exegesis: the cultural work
the discourse is expected to do or fails to do...the methods by
which exegetes (re)establish authoritative practices; and the
strategies by which they authorize their works within particular
social and institutional settings" (9). This argument develops
through case studies drawn from particularly fraught moments in the
history of exegesis, "beginning with scripture, progressing to the age
of Augustine; passing next to the twelfth to thirteenth centuries, and
ending with the fourteenth to fifteenth centuries" (13). The reviewer
and I might disagree about whether such a thing as "discontinuous
history" is worthwhile, but it should be recognized that the book does
have an explicit overall design and rationale for the selection of
texts.

The point of the book, what Professor Lifshitz calls the "broader
approach," is to develop a sociohermeneutic analysis of exegesis that
brings out writers' particular agendas, and the social, institutional
circumstances of exegesis (11). From my perspective, the fact that
Professor Lifshitz considers each chapter compelling means the case
studies function as intended: each provides an in-depth analysis of
particular works in particular contexts. Although the reviewer does
not seek or recognize methodological and theoretical unity in the
book, those are nonetheless valid principles of literary study. The
chapters could doubtless be torn apart (what chapters cannot?), but
the whole, even in her representation of it, does advance an argument
about how, in each successive age, exegetes invent new literary forms
in order to re-write scripture for new audiences.